Robotic Nation Evidence

Many examples of Moore's Law this week:

• AMD demos first dual-core processor - "The chips -- which contain two processor cores and 1M byte of Level 2 cache for each core -- use the same 940-pin socket used by AMD's single-core Opteron processors manufactured with a 90-nanometer process, according to information posted on the AMD's Web site. This compatibility will allow HP, Sun Microsystems Inc. and IBM Corp. to incorporate dual-core Opterons in existing systems that are designed for the Opteron, AMD said."
  
  
• Intel's 65nm chip will make laptops go further - "Intel has built a fully functional 70Mb static random access memory (SRam) chip with more than half a billion transistors, using 65nanometer (nm) process technology."
  
  
• Computer hard drives perform better, last longer with novel polyester lubricant
  
  
• NIST Unveils Chip-Scale Atomic Clock - "The heart of a minuscule atomic clock—believed to be 100 times smaller than any other atomic clock—has been demonstrated by scientists at the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), opening the door to atomically precise timekeeping in portable, battery-powered devices for secure wireless communications, more precise navigation and other applications."
  
  
• 96 Processors Under Your Desktop - "A small Santa Clara-based company, Orion Multisystems, today unveils a new concept in computing, 'cluster workstations.' In October, you'll be able to choose between a 12-processor unit for less than $10,000 and a 96-processor system for less than $100,000. These new systems are powered by Efficeon processors from Transmeta and are running Fedora Linux version 2.6.6."

The last one is interesting. It echoes the "workstation boom" in the 1980s, when players like Sun, Apollo, DEC, IBM, etc. battled it out for the scientific desktop with UNIX workstations.

This machine is not quite as impressive as it sounds at first. According to this page, an Efficeon is only about one-quarter as fast as a Pentium. So this machine might "only" be as powerful as a 20- or 25-Pentium workstation. The reason for using the Efficeon, despite its relative slowness, is its low wattage per calculation. If you put 25 Pentiums in a box, they would consume 3,000 or 4,000 watts -- it would blast you out of your office with the heat, and you would need to run a special 30-amp circuit to plug it in. For comparison, a typical electric clothes dryer uses 4,000 watts. By using Efficeon chips, at 8 watts per chip, the whole machine uses "only" as much power as a blow drier.

The thing that is interesting about this machine is the amount of horsepower it makes available in an "off-the-shelf" package. If history repeats itself, then in ten years this is the horsepower that a "normal" $500 desktop machine will have available. Along with many terabytes of storage space.

See Robotic Nation for details.

This is a good example of the unusual forms robots can take in the future:

GM Mobility - Sit-N-Lift

From the article:

GM is the only automotive manufacturer in the U.S. to offer a fully motorized, rotating lift-and-lower passenger seat to help people stay on the move. Sit-N-Lift™(1) provides convenient access to the right-hand second-row seating area. Operated by a handheld remote control, the power bucket seat rotates, then extends out of the vehicle and lowers for easy entry and exit. This dealer-installed accessory called Sit-N-Lift™(1) is available on 2001 through 2004 extended wheelbase models of Chevy Venture, Pontiac Montana and Oldsmobile Silhouette.

Imagine hospital beds that automatically load, roll and bathe patients. Imagine sofas and chairs that rearrange themselves, come when you call them and that move themselves for easy cleaning. And so on.

Build your own Gakken crab-bot - Engadget - www.engadget.com

Rise in offshoring breeds job insecurity among U.S. workers

From the article:

"With an expanding array of jobs vulnerable to being moved offshore, many Americans will migrate to such fields as health care and education, which require face-to-face contact, the experts predict."

Automation isn't just allowing individuals to do more work than they once did, it's eliminating the need for many of those individuals in the first place. Technology is wiping out whole categories of lower-wage jobs such as supermarket cashiers, airport ticket agents and bank tellers.

This is exactly the point of Robotic Nation.

If this transition happened slowly, that would be one thing. The problem is that the transition is going to happen very quickly -- much faster than we've seen before. That speed will cause a great deal of turmoil.

People will try to transition to "health care and education", but then those fields will be automated as well. See for example:

• Robotic Education
  
  
• Robots and Teachers
  
  
• The arrival of the robotic hospital
  
  
• More Hospital Robots

Every aspect of our economy will be automating simultaneously. Retail stores will be eliminating millions of employees. The tranportation sector will be turning to robotic cars, trucks and planes. And so on. See Robots taking jobs for a fascinating list.

See Robotic Nation for details. See yesterday's census numbers for statistical evidence of the trend.

Australian scientists turn to insect swarms for new generation weapons

From the article:

Alex Ryan, a mathematician with the government's defense Science and Technology Organisation, heads a team that is working on computer software recreating swarm behaviour for use on the battlefield.

The goal is to develop swarms of small, expendable unmanned vehicles that can carry out missions in ground, sea and aerial environments too dangerous for humans.

It is easy to imagine a number of scenarios:

• A bank robber walks into the bank's lobby, and 250 robotic insects jump out of the woodwork and encase him.
• A protestor shouting at a presidential candidate out of turn is encased by 250 robotic insects who inject him with tranquilizers.
• A famous person does not have body guards, but instead has a swarm of robotic insects hovering overhead ready to descend at a moment's notice.
• On a battlefield, a C-130 airplane releases 1,000,000 robotic insects behind enemy lines, and the insects find and poison every enemy combatant.
• Those same 1,000,000 robotic insects could do the same thing at a riot, or at a peaceful demonstration.
• And so on...

Land of the rising robot



From the article:

Hiroshi Kobayashi, one of Japan's leading robot scientists, says he believes the concept of a moving humanoid robot will become invaluable in the future.

His own designs include a muscle suit to help physically disabled people with movement, and his robotic receptionist will be on the market within the next year.

Also:

Yoichi Takamoto, CEO of Japanese robotics business TMSUK, says his company is working closely with the Japanese fire service to make its "Hyper Robot" become a key member of a fire fighting crew.

Combat robots wow crowds

From the article:

A robot fighting contest that draws huge crowds in Japan each year has highlighted sophisticated technological trends in robotics, experts say.

Also:

Richardson adds that the fighting machines highlight the trend for making robots more robust. "There's a definite trend in the last few years to have more fault-tolerant humanoid robots," he says. "At some point they are going to fall over, so make them so they don’t get damaged and can get back up again."

The article links to two videos, including this one (3.90MB MPG) and this one (3.48MB MPG). See also Robotic Security.

NASA engineers refine Robonaut

From the article:

Robonaut B, a robot built with human-like hands and television camera eyes, now has the option of rolling around Earth on a modified two-wheeled Segway scooter or grappling the International Space Station with what researchers call a "space leg."

"We built Robonaut B to be portable," said Robert Ambrose, robonaut project lead at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston,Texas. "It really exceeded our expectations."

The second in the robonaut series, Robonaut B is a self-contained robot controlled remotely by a human operator. Future incarnations of the mobile robot could prove vital companions for astronauts living and working on the moon and in space.

"We're looking at other lower bodies for the moon, with a four-wheel or six-wheel base," Ambrose said. "We're not going to take a Segway to the moon, but it's a good way to emulate the idea on Earth."

See also Robots and NASA and Robotic repair.

Mini helicopter unveiled in Japan



From the article:

The latest tiny flying robot has been unveiled in Japan, armed with top-of- the-range high-tech gadgetry.

Seiko Epson launched the FR-II, which is lighter than an empty drinks can [12 grams]. It carries a digital camera, and, unlike other flying robots, a battery.

NASA Develops Robust AI For Planetary Rovers

From the article:

NASA is planning to add a strong dose of artificial intelligence (AI) to planetary rovers to make them much more self-reliant, capable of making basic decisions during a mission.

Scientists at NASA Ames Research Center, in the heart of California's Silicon Valley, are developing very complex AI software that enables a higher level of robotic intelligence.

In the past, very simple artificial intelligence systems on board rovers allowed them to make some simple decisions, but much smarter AI will enable these mobile robots to make many decisions now made by mission controllers.

Ohio State University develops robotic tomato harvester for the J.F. Kennedy Space Center

Further research in robotic farming is being helped by NASA of all people. According to the article:

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) considers farming a matter of survival for future long-term space missions. Plants provide food when deliveries from Earth aren't feasible and make air breathable and water drinkable. But who will care for and harvest crops when astronauts are so busy carrying out key mission tasks? "Labor requirements to grow and harvest the crops must be reduced through automation," said Peter Ling, an Ohio State University Extension specialist.

Also:

The harvester includes a sensing unit and a robotic hand integrated with a commercial robotic manipulator provided by Motoman Inc., West Carrollton, Ohio.

The sensing unit, or robotic eye, scans the tomato plant and determines the number and position of red fruits. With this information, the four-finger prosthetic hand moves in the direction of the fruit. The fingers then open around the tomato and get a hold of it before a pulling, bending or torsion movement is applied to detach it.

There are plans to expand the research into other fruit crops like apples and oranges.

See also:

• Produce picking robot
• Agricultural robots to take over the farm
• Farms and robots

The company called Metal Storm creates guns that can fire bullets at rates "in excess of one million rounds per minute". It is probably safe to say that a gun that can shoot a million rounds a minute is fairly lethal. So the obvious thing to do is to give such a gun to a robot, as demonstrated in this video collection:

Metal Storm - Video - Latest Releases



See also: Successful X-45 robotic bomber

The Coming Robot Revolution

From the article:

Robots, from mechanical dogs that can learn new tricks to automated vacuum cleaners that avoid furniture, are steadily becoming a part of everyday life. But the real robot boom lies just ahead, experts say.

CNN.com - Olympics' digital security unprecedented

From the article:

If you're going to the Olympics, you'd better be careful what you say and do in public.

Software will be watching and listening.

Recent leaps in technology have paired highly sophisticated software with street surveillance cameras to create digital security guards with intelligence-gathering skills.

Also:

It gathers images and audio from an electronic web of over 1,000 high-resolution and infrared cameras, 12 patrol boats, 4,000 vehicles, nine helicopters, a sensor-laden blimp and four mobile command centers.

This is an extremely good example of a Robotic Bubble. As we create humanoid robotic guards and armed robotic security forces these bubbles will get bigger and much tighter.

The bubble around Washington is being noted in articles like these:

• Street Closing Irks D.C. Leaders (washingtonpost.com): "...set up 14 vehicle checkpoints, creating a huge security perimeter around powerful symbols..."
  
  
• The New York Times: Safety Precautions Transform Appearance of Capitol Hill

It is very easy to imagine the day when you cannot enter any American city unless you have permission to do so. They will all be protected by bubbles.

See also Robotic Surveillance and Manna for details.

Taiwan firms to launch 2TB memory card

From the article:

The format will support up to 2TB of storage capacity within a 3.2 x 2.4 x 0.1cm card - the same size as a standard MMC unit. The new cards are said to be connector-compatible with the older format.

The new cards will have a data transfer rate of 120MBps, ten times that of SD memory cards. Like the Secure Digital format, µcard will support I/O devices, such as Bluetooth and 802.11 adaptors.

It is very rare today to find a personal computer with one terabyte of disk space. If it has it, it is made up of 4 to 10 drives and has an access rate of 30 or 40 MB/sec. The drive array takes up a cubic foot or more of space, consumes lots of electricity, generates lots of heat and weighs 20 pounds.

In 10 years, robots will be running around with two terabytes of memory that is 4 times faster, uses no power to speak of and fills a cubic centimeter of space. That's the effect of Moore's Law. See also:

• Keeping up with Moore's Law
• Moore's law and hard disks
• The effects of Moore's law

Another example of the same trend: Holographic discs look like DVDs but hold a terabyte of information. Today.

Popular Science | A Limber Future

The article notes:

At this stage, however, NanoSonic is busy meeting the demand for its 12-inch-by-12-inch samples, which take custom-built robots up to three days to create. That’s speedy, if you consider that Metal Rubber, a product of nanotechnology, must be fabricated molecule by molecule.

The screen-age: Our brains in our laptops

From the article:

A student may have a textbook open. The television is on with sound off (perhaps with the CNN Headline News modular screen). They've got music on headphones. On a laptop hooked in to the Internet there's a homework window, along with e-mail and instant messaging in the background. The Web has become an essential part of checking facts and figures for the homework (not to mention plagiarizing with copy and paste). On top of that, the student may field phone calls or talk with a roommate.

One of the most striking observations in Turkle's findings was a quote from one multi-tasking student who preferred the online world to the face-to-face world. "Real life," he said, "is just one more window."

College students are the leading edge in adapting to this new goldfish bowl, these new multi-tasking sense ratios. Some of us will hold on to the old ways by our fingernails, afraid of losing a coherent self. Others will plunge into the new collective nerve center, our various selves loosely joined in a partial free-fall at all times.

This goes back to the post entitled Robots and teachers, and helps explain why "traditional education" using a human lecturer standing at a whiteboard simply will not last that much longer. It it too boring, too slow...

I gave a talk to a group of robotics folks on Monday night, and one of the concerns that came up in the Q&A session afterwards was that Moore's Law will somehow "run out of steam." Two of the problems that people brought up included, a) the ever-shrinking size of transistors cannot continue forever, and b) increasing power consumption cannot continue forever. One point made is that current supercomputers (the kind with 10,000 Pentium chips running in parallel) can consume 10 to 20 megawatts of power. Certainly a robot cannot consume 20 megawatts.

I understand both points, but I think they are both irrelevant. First, we KNOW it is possible to produce a high-performance, low power CPU. Each one of us has a brain that performs something on the order of one quadrillion operations per second, yet it consumes only 20 watts.

Second, Scientists and engineers make discoveries all the time, and things simply get faster and faster. 20 years ago a Cray computer ran so hot that the entire computer (as big as a refrigerator) was immersed in liquid FC-77 to extract the prodigious amounts of heat it created. Today you can get that same power in a little desktop computer cooled with a small fan. That's normal progress, and there's nothing going to stop that sort of progress.

Here are two articles that show current trends in making computers faster and more efficient:

Sun chips away at wireless chip connections

From the article:

It will take a lot of work, but Sun Microsystems says it is making headway on a technology that will allow chips to communicate without circuit boards or wires.

The technology, called "proximity communication," aims to let one chip transmit signals directly to another next to it, instead of through the tangle of pins, wires and circuit boards employed today. If successful, the technique could greatly alter many aspects of computer design.

Performance, for instance, could greatly escalate because the speed of transferring data among chips and the number of channels for the transfers would increase. Energy consumption could also decline. Just as important, overall costs could fall, because defective chips could be removed like Scrabble tiles.

Also:

The technique could also allow designers to remove the cache--the large pool of memory currently found on the processor--and put it on a separate chip. Caches were integrated onto processors to amplify bandwidth. Adding cache, however, bumps up manufacturing costs, as it greatly increases the number of transistors. With the bandwidth constraint gone, caches could once again be made independent without it having an impact on performance.

If you take out the cache -- representing millions of transistors -- you can use those transistors for something else. See this page for some thoughts.

This article talks about a whole new paradigm for computing:

Nanotech leads way to quantum computing

From the article:

Plastic chips and quantum computing could be among the new ways of keeping up with Moore's Law in the future, according to a new study on nanotechnology, the science of manipulating matter on a molecular level.

One point I made in my talk and in my article discussed how quickly airplanes advanced between 1903 and 1954:

Imagine that you could travel back in time to the year 1900. Imagine that you stand on a soap box on a city street corner in 1900 and you say to the gathering crowd, "By 1955, people will be flying at supersonic speeds in sleek aircraft and traveling coast to coast in just a few hours." In 1900, it would have been insane to suggest that. In 1900, airplanes did not even exist. Orville and Wilbur did not make the first flight until 1903. The Model T Ford did not appear until 1909.

Yet, by 1947, Chuck Yeager flew the X1 at supersonic speeds. In 1954, the B-52 bomber made its maiden flight. It took only 51 years to go from a rickety wooden airplane flying at 10 MPH, to a gigantic aluminum jet-powered Stratofortress carrying 70,000 pounds of bombs halfway around the world at 550 MPH.

That is the kind of progress we will continue to see in computing power over the next 50 years. We will see progress in transitor size and power consumption, packaging, etc. We will also see completely new paradigms arise. What these developments mean is a dramatic increase in robotic intelligence over the next several decades, along with dramatic changes in the world economy.

See also:

• Moore's Law continues
• Moore's law and hard disks
• Future processors
• The effects of Moore's law
• Robotic AI using Neural Nets

Europe has a new spacecraft to ferry supplies up to the International Space Station. It is just about ready for its maiden flight, and it is completely robotic -- it has no accomodations for human pilots or passengers, and burns up on re-entry so it has no use as a "life boat" either.

Europe Creates its Own Space Vehicle



From the article:

After the launch of the Jules Verne, one ATV will be launched by ESA about every year, carrying 7.5 tons of cargo from the Kourou launch site in French Guyana. The cylindrical vessel weighs 20 tons and measures 10.3 meters long (33.79 feet) and 4.5 meters in diameter. After a journey of up to five days, it will dock with the space station's Russian service module using a precision laser tracking system that looks like a scene straight out of "Star Wars."

By eliminating humans from the system, the design and manufacturing process is highly simplified -- no life support; no extra weight and space for chairs, controls, displays; no need to worry about re-entry; No "escape hatches"; etc.

See also Robots and Nasa and Robotic repair call to Hubble taking shape.

If this takes off, it his will be a very short-lived phenomenon:

A car that winks, laughs and cries

From the article:

Four inventors working for Toyota in Japan have won a patent for a car that they say can help drivers communicate better by glaring angrily at another car cutting through traffic as well as appear to cry, laugh, wink or just look around.

The inventors explain in the patent that they want drivers to have more than a one-note horn and on-off headlights to signal other drivers. The horn sounds the same, they write, whether a driver is asking for permission to cut in front of another car or showing gratitude for having been allowed to cut in front, so other people often do not know what the honking is about.

The reason it will be short-lived is because, within 15 years or so, cars will all be driving themselves and communicating with each other and a central data center continuously. There will be no need for something as primitive and silly as tears. The cars will be sharing reams of data at the speed of light.

See also: Robot drivers.